On Friday, Disney fired James Gunn, the director who helped make the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise a massive box-office hit, and who was in the process of finishing the script for its third installment. His downfall began, like many mistakes do, on Twitter. After actor-director-producer Mark Duplass tweeted praise for right-wing pundit Ben Shapiro, Gunn came to his defense and became entangled with a handful of alt-right personalities. Not long after this dispute, The Daily Caller published a handful of old, cringe-y tweets in which Gunn joked about pedophilia and molestation. (Sample: “I want to go big game hunting but know it’s morally questionable. So I’m going to split the difference and go big game raping.”) They were gross and tasteless, but alt-right personalities like Mike Cernovich—of Infowars and Pizzagate infamy—purposefully misinterpreted them as serious indicators that Gunn is a child molester. Before you could say “teen Groot,” Walt Disney Studios chair Alan Horn announced that Gunn would no longer be working with the company, publicly condemning his old posts as “indefensible and inconsistent” with the studio’s values. Gunn, in turn, issued his own reply: “As I’ve developed as a person, so has my work and my humor,” he tweeted. “It’s not to say I’m better, but I am very, very different than I was a few years ago; today I try to root my work in love and connection and less in anger. My days saying something just because it’s shocking and trying to get a reaction are over.”
“Hollywood Man Cut From Project Like Cancerous Mole” is the simple version of the story, and one we’ve become rightfully acquainted with as the entertainment industry continues to grapple with decades’ worth of misogyny, sexual harassment, and discrimination. But the details of Gunn’s offense and undoing, in particular, indicate a new era of hyperpartisan, crowdsourced opposition campaigns on Hollywood’s horizon. In May, Disney-owned ABC abruptly canceled its highly rated reboot of Roseanne, after show lead Roseanne Barr tweeted a racist remark about former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett. Though Barr’s vile comments were not equivalent to Gunn’s gross jokes, both figures’ punishments were the same, and they mark an emerging post-Gamergate trend among networks and movie studios to sever ties with talent on the very day they are revealed to be problematic. Major Hollywood productions must now contend with the slippery personal brands of headline actors, directors, and producers to preserve their names and fortunes. That Gunn’s hasty termination has been met with protest from fans suggests they’re still struggling with how to do that. What credence should a corporate entity like Disney give to an online mob’s complaints? How should it determine (or enforce) a standard of behavior? And to what lengths is it willing to go to ensure an untainted creative project? Amid this field of land mines, a specific contractual question between talent and entertainment companies has emerged: How quickly can one party jump ship the second the other self-sabotages its brand?
Social media has been around long enough for us to age with it, and most people’s accounts are filing cabinets of past personae, neuroses, and ill-conceived opinions. In an attempt to maintain a steady stream of “whataboutism,” alt-right figures are now exploiting these repositories with extreme vigor. Major movie and television companies are much more concerned with the damage that negative scrutiny can do to a big-budget project’s rollout than they appear to be with offering nuanced solutions to social media scandals. In turn, they are scrambling for practical ways to protect themselves from the potential expense of a Barr or a Gunn. As Douglas Johnson, an entertainment lawyer at a Los Angeles–based firm, told me of recent contractual negotiations: “They’re looking for a quick out.”
In some cases, issues of public perception can be solved by simply investing more in background checks. Franchises like The Bachelor and The Bachelorette have suffered in recent years when contestants’ hateful posts or social media activity surfaced midseason. One casting director I spoke to earlier this month said that mistakes like those are more common because networks have passed the vetting costs onto production companies, which are less likely to spend money on thorough investigations. Recent missteps—including the casting of a man who had been previously charged for groping and assaulting a woman (he was later convicted)—have been enough to catch the networks’ attention. This month, Rob Mills, ABC’s senior vice president of alternative programming, told The Ringer that The Bachelor would more thoroughly vet its contestants’ online activity.
But in the case of deals between major companies like Disney and talent like Gunn, Johnson said that behind-the-scenes legal negotiations are mostly focused on who will be held responsible if and when either side’s reputation is smeared. The morality clause—a piece of standard contractual language that has historically allowed brands to terminate contracts with celebrities—has become a hot topic. Celebrities now want the ability to do the same with brands that have misbehaved. And both sides are pushing for more flexibility as to what qualifies as a moral violation in the first place.
“People are getting sideswiped by stuff they never even thought would hit them,” Johnson said. “So they’re just trying to craft language in contracts that is as broad as possible. And now there’s a big fight in town between talent and the other side. Because talent is saying, ‘Well, wait a minute, this could be almost subjective.’ Who wants to get thrown off of a film because somebody reads something the wrong way?”
Gunn is just one of many celebrities who has been careless enough to leave a previous lifetime’s worth of tasteless jokes online. That someone with a public-facing job would still think it’s OK to keep an extensive record of pedophilia-related humor under his name on the internet speaks to the deep hubris of the entertainment industry. According to Johnson, that’s part of the reason studios don’t simply tell their talent to wipe their online accounts before reporting to set. “I have never heard of someone being required to go back and scrub all of their social media,” Johnson said. “A lot of these guys live and die on their social, so I think that’d be unusual.” Given that Hollywood has proved a fruitful arena for both liberal and conservative vigilantes, another high-profile firing seems likely. And it may ultimately be a new era of contracts with broad morality clauses—not common sense or decency—that motivates talent to tidy up their social media accounts.
“With these clauses that are being drafted, if they don’t clean out stuff that’s objectionable, they’re putting themselves subject to be thrown off a project,” Johnson said. “On their own, they’re probably going to be [deleting]. And that’s probably enough deterrent without needing to write in that, ‘Hey, you better go back and scrub everything.’”
Since Gunn’s firing, both Rick and Morty’s Dan Harmon and Last Week Tonight’s Jill Twiss have been targeted by enterprising online sleuths in an attempt to stain their reputations. Ideally, Hollywood executives would be able to sift through this madness by weighing the nuances and offenses of each case carefully. In reality, the fate of creators’ reputations may very well come down to a few lines in a something-million-dollar contract that implies in legalese, what the internet has been saying all along: never tweet.